Now that the 40-year-old hippie dream of closing Vermont Yankee has been achieved, here’s a modest proposal for replacing those hundreds of lost high-tech jobs. The new marijuana dispensaries undoubtedly will need clerks. And, given the increased numbers of dazed and confused, not to mention physically sick, people soon to be crowding our state due to toxic smoke inhalation, those clerks will need plenty of backup.

Those not laboring in the soon-to-be hemp fields, or making cute novelties out of hemp fibers, can back up those clerks too ill or disoriented to come to work. The 1970s Vermont commune movement is at last bearing fruit as our governor and legislators lead the way in transforming the United States into a Third World country.